Beliefs
Winchester was "committed to the “hermeneutic of holiness”", and has been described as "the descriptive-doctrinaire approach" to teaching biblical theology. According to Ingersol, "Winchester had earned high marks in biblical criticism at Glasgow but was conservative in her application of this knowledge within the Nazarene context. Her books included studies of Moses, the prophets, and the life of Jesus. Her Crisis Experiences in the Greek New Testament (1953) stood in the linguistic-exegetical tradition tradition pioneered by Daniel Steele, a Methodist scholar at Boston University.
Steele defended the doctrine of entire sanctification by a study of the Greek aorist, and Winchester appropriated his agenda and attempted to develop it further, though this approach has since fallen out of favor with many Wesleyan-holiness biblical scholars.
However, Nazarene theologian and general superintendent John A. Knight argued in 1995 that Winchester and Steele were part of an "earlier generation of holiness-traditions scholars overstated the grammatical evidence for entire sanctification as a 'second definite work of grace.'
Winchester rejected the increasingly prevalent premillennial perspective. Reflecting the New England tradition of Wesleyan-holiness biblical scholarship shaped by Daniel Steele, she was amillennial and interpreted the Book of Revelation as a coded record of events that had occurred in the New Testament era, perhaps during Nero’s reign, not predictions of the future.
In 1931, Winchester wrote a series on science and religion in The Young People’s Journal, a Nazarene publication for high school youth, where she had a regular column.
In the second essay in the series, Winchester described three scientific theories on the origins of the universe, identifying her own view as the “planetismal theory,” which held that the observable universe developed as gravitational forces caused matter to coalesce over long eons of time. Nazarene theologian A. M. Hills embraced the identical view when he discussed the Christian doctrine of creation in his 2-vol Fundamental Christian Theology. While neither believed in biological evolution, Winchester and Hills embraced cosmic and geological evolution without compunction.
Winchester was quoted as saying: "When in a mental fog, attend to definitions."
Read more about this topic: Olive Winchester
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